Three Questions to Keep in Mind When You’re Choosing New Flooring for Your Commercial Property

Preparing the fixtures and floorings of a commercial building are about what makes the most financial sense. When you’re a real estate investor, financial sense becomes a lot more multi-faceted: you can consider the immediate costs of renovating a building to get it ready for commercial tenants; you might focus on the long-term costs of renovations and repairs between tenants; instead of focusing on reducing costs, maybe your business plan is to maximize revenue and appeal: some flooring choices attract different potential tenants. No matter what your specific style of commercial real estate investing is, here are some questions you should ask yourself anytime you need to replace a building’s floors.

What are the most important factors you should consider when renovating the flooring in your commercial buildings?

Does it give the widest range of options, not only for each client’s customization but also for the range of clients you can have? Carpets are cheap in the short-term, but they don’t give your clients many options. If you want to open up your commercial buildings to everyone from office tenants to retailers to car repair or industrial businesses, you need flooring that works well for all of them. A polyurea floor coating protects the flooring of your property from the wide range of traffic, chemical exposure, and impact that commercial tenants can bring, and the right color palette also works well as a backdrop to even client-facing operations. With floor coating, your clients even have the option to bring in carpets, impact mats for employees on their feet for long hours, and any other regulated flooring their industry demands.

How quickly can you redo the flooring now, and how long will future maintenance and repairs take? Each step of shotblasting your concrete floors and applying the coating layers is designed to be fast: most floors are installed in just the course of a day. Not only does quick application lead to stronger material bonding, we know commercial floors are on a tight timeline. Once the coatings have been applied, you don’t have to wait for days for the material to dry or a week for curing like with other commercially available products: you can continue your other renovations after just four to six hours, and you can start to wheel in machinery or even vehicles after twenty-four hours. This quick process can fold into your scheduled turn-around between tenants whether you do it in the middle of your other projects or save it until the very end. Maintenance is also fast: because the topcoat repels chemicals and can stand up to impact, you won’t have to do much between tenants besides run a mop over it and check the high-traffic areas for lower glossiness (which just means you need a quick application of topcoat).

How does the new flooring improve the space? Commercial buildings can have some pretty rough flooring. Not only do industrial buildings face a lot of wear and tear through heavy equipment, frequent foot traffic, and a lot of exposure to different elements, they are often built with the bare minimum in mind. This means that any bare concrete floors are probably stained, cracked, and pitted; even carpeted floors might have a lot of underlying damage from previous refinishes. But PolyTek’s process of preparing a floor for coating removes the top latent layer of concrete, which is the surface level that not only collects chemicals, moisture, and UV damage but also is the weakest part of any concrete floor due to the initial curing process. We shave off that layer through shotblasting to both remove those inherent weaknesses and to make sure the flooring grips the strongest layer of the underlying concrete.

Fixing up your commercial properties’ flooring is just one of a long list of decisions you have to make to get the buildings ready for tenants. Having a clear list of considerations that take both your current budget and your future profits into consideration can help make the process easier, and so can standardization: a polyurea floor coating is the right choice for any commercial building, no matter who your expected tenants are or the current condition of the building. Go to PolyTek Surface Coatings here to pick which floor coating fits best.